SiSoftware Publishes their Ryzen 7 2700X/ Ryzen 5 2600 review early

We snagged their results before their were removed from their website.

SiSoftware Publishes their Ryzen 7 2700X/ Ryzen 5 2600 review early

Today SiSoftware published an early review for AMD's upcoming Ryxen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600 CPUs, before quickly taking their work offline after it attracted notice. Thankfully we managed to save copies of their work before it was removed from the internet, giving us the opportunity to share with you some of their results.

What must first be mentioned is that these benchmarks are only from the SiSoftware benchmarking suite, so don't expect any gaming benchmarks here, though you can expect to see a lot of what has changed with AMD's refreshed Ryzen lineup, where the upgrade isn't just a clock speed boost.

Let's start off with inter-core latency, both in terms of inter-CCX and inter-unit values. AMD is still using their CCX model to create Ryzen CPUs, where each cluster of four cores is separated into individual units, offering higher latencies for inter CCX communications than communications with other cores in the same group. SiSoftware's results can be seen in the Inter-Core Latency graph below. We also have an excerpt from their review discussing Inter-core latency (all quotes from this article are from SiSoftware's report).

The multiple CCX design still presents some challenges to programmers requiring threads to be carefully scheduled – but we see a decent 6-7% reduction in L3/CCX latencies on Ryzen2 even when running at the same clock as Ryzen1.

On the topic of latencies, the review also highlighted changes to AMD's cache structure which decreased their latencies, making AMD's cache more responsive. While AMD's latencies are still a little high when compared to Intel's i7 6700K, they offer a decrease of 6-8% across the board, which isn't an insignificant change.

While code access latencies were not a problem on Ryzen1 and they also see a 8% improvement on Ryzen2 which is welcome.

When looking at Cache and memory data latency, we see a similar 8% improvement as we did in Cache/memory code latency, though larger changes can be observed when looking at Cache and Memory Transfer speeds, where a 20-30% performance gain is seen over AMD's Ryzen 1700X.

We see big improvements on Ryzen2 for all caches L1D/L2/L3 of 20-30% – more than just raw clock increase (11%) – so AMD has indeed made improvements – which to be fair needed to be done. The memory controller is also a bit more efficient (2%) though it can run at higher clocks – hopefully fast DDR4 memory will become more affordable.

Looking into Sandra's Cryptography tests, we see a significant improvement in some areas when moving from AMD's 1700X to their new 2700X. In AES-256 and AES-128 workloads, the CPU offers a minor 1% boost, whereas in SHA workloads we see increases from 12-14% which makes sense given how memory bound those algorithms can be.

In memory bandwidth bound algorithms, Ryzen2 will have to be used with faster memory (up to 2933Mt/s officially) in order to significantly beat its older Ryzen1 brother. Otherwise there is only a tiny 1% improvement.

Moving onto SiSoft's .Net testing we see improvements of 8-20% when upgrading to AMD's new Ryzen 2 2700X, which is an increase with is not proportional to the clock speed increases seen with the Ryzen 7 2700X.

Ryzen1’s performance in .Net was pretty incredible but Ryzen2 is even faster – even faster than expected by mere clock speed increase. There is only one game in town now for .Net applications.

AMD's first Ryzen CPUs are good number crunchers, though AMD's second generation processors seem to fare a lot better here, with increases of 10-28% in SiSoftware's tests. Not bad for a 12nm refresh.

Ryzen1 dies very well in these algorithms, but Ryzen2 does even better – especially when thread-local data is involved managing 23-28% improvement. For financial workloads Intel does not seem to have a chance anymore – Ryzen is impossible to beat.

Finally, we have SiSoftware's Image processing Native benchmarks, which again showcase a nice boost from the 2700X, with improvements of between 8-12%. These improvements are both due to boosted clock speeds and Ryzen 2nd Gen's increased cache speed and responsiveness.

With all the modern instruction sets supported (AVX2, FMA, AES and SHA HWA) Ryzen2 does extremely well in all workloads – but it generally improves only by the 11% as per clock speed increase, except in some cases which seem to show improvements in the cache and memory system (which we have not tested yet).

Remember that these benchmark results are not ours, but come from two early reports from SiSoftware, which were available at these links before they ware removed from their website (Link 1, 2).

What can be seen here is that AMD's Ryzen 2nd Generations CPUs aren't just Ryzen with higher clock speeds, there is more to it than that. Some of Ryzen's weaknesses have been worked on, decreasing inter-core and cache latencies to improve the responsiveness of their processor, while also increasing their cache bandwidth to offer further gains. It remains to be seen how these improvements will enhance the performance of Ryzen 2 outside of benchmarks, though we are more excited than ever to find out.

Wonder how much 12nm benefited them for latency. If they were able to move things closer and have an overall more dense die.

The did decrease the latency on their 14nm Raven Ridge parts, though it remains to be seen whether or not this takes things a step further. Hard to know how much die size has dropped until somebody looks and measures. AMD could have used more transistors after all.Quote

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